James Joyce's Ulysses clocks 1,000 pages, weighs 1.5lbs and remains widely unread. Bloomsday is a different story entirely.

"I’ve been doing this for years. But I’m always totally taken aback when somebody flies in from Tokyo to be here for a day that never really happened. It’s great!"

Helen Monaghan, Director of the James Joyce Centre, wears an intriguing smile. Sitting in the Cobalt Café on Dublin’s North Great George’s Street, James Joyce's grandniece is discussing Bloomsday. It is a busy smile; a little bemused, but definitely mischievous.

It’s easy to get carried away with programmes of events surrounding contemporary celebrations, of course, forgetting that for much of the 20th century, it was very different.

"I seriously think that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking glass," Joyce wrote in a letter to Grant Richards in 1906, trying to engineer the publication of ‘Dubliners’.

Richards relented in 1914, but the author had long since fled his homeland. "How sick, sick, sick I am of Dublin!" he wrote in 1909. "It is the city of failure, of rancour and of unhappiness."

‘Ulysses’ fared little better. Released in 1922, the Dublin press decried "a perverted lunatic who has made a speciality of the literature of the latrine". Largely unavailable in Ireland until the 1960s, the scandal never quite dissipated. Joseph Strick’s movie adaptation, released in 1968, remained censored until 2001.

All has changed. "It’s what we talk about when we’re celebrating Joyce’s works. It’s the heroic commonplace of the everyday," says Ms Monaghan. "One of the reasons Joyce holds such sway in the canon is because this is a celebration of Leopold Bloom, the everyman, and the minute detail of everyday life in Dublin."

Reflecting this, it is the stated aim of the James Joyce Centre to make Joyce more accessible. "We have no problem in standing up and saying we’re not here for the academics. We work with some of them, we have facilities for them and they’re very welcome, but we’re here to get everyone else to read Joyce." PhDs are not required.

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